Viengping Fare: From Exotic to Easy-to-Eat

Viengping is a nickname for northern Thailand’s Chiang Mai region. It’s also the name of a tiny, friendly restaurant located in a string of shops and eating places across from Melrose Avenue’s Bangkok Market. The food, in both the region and the restaurant, depends less on coconut milk than elsewhere in Thailand; instead, the emphasis is on chiles and sticky (glutinous) rice.

Viengping, also known as the V.P. Cafe, produces its own wonderful northern-style sausages. These are served in salads and in some of the restaurant’s Chiang Mai rice dishes. In these, the rice is packed in a little basket to keep it moist. You scoop out a bit and dip it into spicy concoctions such as nam prik ong , a ground pork and tomato mixture that tastes of shrimp paste and fish sauce, or nam prik noom , a powerful Thai “salsa” based on roasted green chiles. Cooling vegetables such as cabbage and sliced cucumber, served on the side, soothe the flames in your mouth.

In most Thai restaurants, the ground-meat dish larb is tangy with lime or lemon juice. But Chiang Mai’s cooks eliminate the sourness and employ instead a spice mix that contains cinnamon, cumin, coriander, star anise and black pepper. Pork larb includes liver and, in keeping with common Thai preferences, the larb is available raw.

Pork hinlay curry is rich and sweet rather than hot. It’s made with packets of hinlay seasoning from Chiang Mai for authenticity.

The dish called gang ho-- it means “everything together”--is a Chiang Mai way of using up leftovers, in this case bean threads, sour bamboo shoots and other vegetables. Crunchy fried egg noodles top kao soi , a bowl of coconut-curry soup that also contains soft boiled noodles. And squares of congealed pork blood accompany ground meat and tomato in a sauce that covers little bundles of rice noodles. Obviously, it’s not a dish for everyone.

But don’t worry. If some of this food is too exotic, Viengping has plenty of easy-to-eat, familiar Thai dishes. I had some of the lightest, most delicate mee krob I’ve ever eaten at Viengping. Beef with oyster sauce is excellent, and kao lard na gai-- chicken over rice with gravy--is soothing Thai-style comfort food.

Salads include an outstanding som tam . This dish is a ringer for pasta salad, only the pale noodles are shredded green papaya, the innocent-looking red flecks are fresh hot chiles, and what looks like grated cheese is ground peanuts. Lime juice, palm sugar and fish sauce blend in a striking sweet-sour dressing, but it is crushed dried shrimp that give som tam its special character. If you want to go for an all-out fishy taste, salted crab can be added to the salad as well.

One salad is made with jackfruit cut into such fine shreds and doused so heavily with chile paste and other seasonings that you would never recognize it. And the house specialty salad is extraordinary, if only for its crunchy yellow croutons. These are not bread but rice mixed with sliced sausage, deep-fried pork, coconut shreds, garlic and salted egg.

Desserts include tapioca served warm with coconut milk and black beans, and bowls of plantains or white yams served in coconut milk. And usually there are fried plantain slices in a crunchy batter made with both fresh and dried coconut.

Prices are low. The northern dishes range from $2.95 for the spicy pork dip to $4.25 for larb .

Viengping Cafe (V.P. Cafe), 4814 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles; (213) 663-7079. Open Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; cash only. No alcohol. Parking.